In the face of a smash-and-grab presidency, with unelected powers destroying humanitarian aid, medical research, and educational institutions, what value is a quiet little art-appreciation project?

I don’t know. But, along with leaning into community, calling my representatives, and supporting local organizations working for housing justice and school equity, it’s one of my survival strategies.

Here’s what I’m doing: Beginning with the earliest recorded film—generally accepted to be Roundhay Garden Scene from 1888—I’m going to watch one film from every year up to the present.

I originally planned to watch one movie a week, making this something like a three-year project. But much of what’s available from the earliest years are fragments only a few minutes long, making it possible to knock out the first few decades fairly quickly. The 35-second Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), which is exactly what it sounds like, is a typical example. The first feature film didn’t arrive until The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, and only about 17 minutes of it survive.

I’ve been choosing titles I’ve collected over the years from critics like Roger Ebert or Josh Larsen, or Best Picture nominees, or selections from the fine YouTube channel Iconauta, or elsewhere. I’ll look for a mix of Hollywood and international, mainstream and avant-garde, weighty and lighthearted, culturally significant or just plain intriguing. I’m not a true film buff, but I like the idea of a slow, methodical observation of one of the world’s great art forms taking shape.

What I’ve noticed from those earliest years is the extent to which filmmakers were still feeling out the storytelling possibilities of a new form. They leaned on the technique of stage theater, with the camera perspective fixed in place and movement essentially confined to two dimensions. Closeups, tracking shots, sound, and color were all still a ways off.

One of the most delightful early filmmakers, Georges Méliès, was essentially making up special effects on the fly, drawing on his background as a magician and inventing techniques like stop-motion, slow-motion, and double exposure. His best-known film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), features a band of intrepid Frenchmen, led by Méliès himself, who build a rocket ship and launch an extraordinary journey. Along with smoke, pyrotechnics, and lavish sets and costumes, there’s a lot of gesticulating and frenetic movement, as if the actors’ bodies themselves are the main source of energy. Méliès understood that, with the tools he had at his disposal, spectacle would win the day over plot and nuance.

I’m also struck by the most basic decisions filmmakers had to make about how audiences would decipher meaning in a new form. Something as simple as cutting from one scene to another presented questions that stage theater never faced. The original version of Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) features a confusing sequence in which a firefighter carries a girl down a ladder, followed by a shot of the firefighter arriving in the blazing upstairs room. Rather than a continuous timeline that cuts between spaces, the filmmaker grouped shots in the same outdoor space together, scrambling the timeline. When continuity editing became the norm in later years, Porter re-cut the film.

I never would have noticed this without The Story of Film (2011), a documentary by Mark Cousins that describes these early filmmakers as a collective entity making discoveries together: “Cinema was learning, experimenting, thinking, even,” says Cousins. “It could now show the flow of action from one space to another.”

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Shortly after the election last fall, I read an essay by Viv Groskop about “interior exile” among Russian intellectuals during periods of political oppression. There’s an element of head-in-the-sand ignorance to bowing out of the news cycle and choosing a private mental retreat instead. But, Groskop argues, a sort of “self-imposed internal exile” is also what allowed Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, and others to create world changing-art. “Solitude, introspection, cogitation, and the quest for intellectual calm became the most important strategies for spiritual survival for these writers,” she says.

When so much of the world is distracted and destabilized, a slow observation of meaning-making at its most basic strikes me as valuable.

One of my favorite teachers on craft is the writer George Saunders. In part I just love his South Side Chicago accent—he comes from the same working-class suburb as my dad and his siblings. But I also love the way he describes, in various podcast interviews, the process of revising a draft. Done with care, he says, revision is a way of raising the “ambient intelligence” of a story. This isn’t about making the writer sound smart but about respecting the time and attention of the audience. In other words, it’s about loving your audience. Saunders was raised Catholic and now identifies as Buddhist, but I find his approach to revision fully in sync with my understanding of the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).

It’s easier to destroy than to create. Any toddler who has toppled a playmate’s tower knows this. The destroyers seem to have the momentum right now. Maybe that’s always the case. But I want to side with the creators. I want to side with those who study craft, curiosity, and the way stories bind us together. I want to side with those stitching together networks of mutual aid and education and research that might advance the knowledge of our blinkered species, even by an inch.

I don’t know what motivated those early filmmakers beyond hearty capitalist ambition and the sheer drive to create. They built stories out of the materials they had and, little by little, sought to make them better.

Creativity is an act of hope.